There’s a perspective that has broken out into the open on both the horseshoe theory Left and the horseshoe theory Right — that America sucks, that America has always sucked, and that there has always been something wrong with the United States.

And that wrongness continues today.

There’s a lot of crossover in these two wings of American politics, but perhaps the most clear exemplar of this philosophy comes in the form of Whoopi Goldberg, who represents a sort of pixilated version of this philosophy, a dumbed-down version of this philosophy.

Wednesday, on ABC’s “The View” ( a repository of nearly all human stupidity), she decided she was going to sound off about the Israel-Iran war. Goldberg, of course, is a believer that Iran is not all that bad, that they can be negotiated with, that there was never anything wrong with Iran, that America has similar problems, and who are we to judge?

She decided to talk about how being a woman in Iran — which can mean being beaten for not wearing the proper head covering, not being able to work at a job they worked at before the Islamic Revolution in 1979 — is the same as being black in America in 2025.

That’s an astonishingly stupid claim. It’s absurd. 

Whoopi Goldberg is sitting there on the set of a nationally televised show, being paid millions of dollars after having been once an actress a long time ago, saying that being black in America is akin to being a woman in Iran, or a gay person in Iran —where gay people in Iran are hanged from cranes.

Whoopi Goldberg is feted for saying unbelievably low IQ, stupid things on a nationally televised show every single day. But apparently, that lack of perspective has become indicative of a broader trend in American life, which is to just whine about America, to crap on America.

It’s not relegated to Whoopi Goldberg. Barack Obama did this for a large part of his career as well, suggesting in 2008 that America always had great ideals, we just hadn’t lived up to them. That was the unifying part. And then, after he won, it turned into America kind of sucks, has kind of always sucked.

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And now it turns out, according to Barack Obama, America sucks even more than usual.

He did an interview with The New York Times in which he suggested that we are drifting into something that is not consistent with American democracy; it’s consistent with autocracies. It’s consistent with Hungary under Viktor Orban.

First of all, we should point out that there are, in fact, elections in Orban’s Hungary. But beyond that, Barack Obama complaining about the twisting of the institutions of the United States against democracy is garbage.

Barack Obama doesn’t really get to talk about this, considering the fact that he used the federal government to threaten private industry very early on in his administration, that he used every aspect of his government in order to crack down on political opposition up to and including the IRS. 

During his tenure, Obama ran down America fairly routinely. He understood that Americans didn’t like that very much. In “Dreams from My Father,” his first book, he wrote:

I know, I have seen, the desperation and disorder of the powerless: how it twists the lives of children on the streets of Jakarta or Nairobi in much the same way as it does the lives of children on Chicago’s South Side, how narrow the path is for them between humiliation and untrammeled fury, how easily they slip into violence and despair. I know that the response of the powerful to this disorder – alternating as it does between a dull complacency and, when the disorder spills out of its proscribed confines, a steady, unthinking application of force, of longer prison sentences and more sophisticated military hardware – is inadequate to the task.

Notice the tacit endorsement of the idea that black people living in the South Side of Chicago is the same thing as impoverished children living on the streets of Jakarta, Indonesia, or Nairobi. That is an absurd contention.

But that sort of moral relativism — that runs throughout a large part of the Left that suggests that America is historically bad — remains bad today. A hallmark of the Left throughout the Cold War era was that there was really no difference between the United States and the Soviet Union. In fact, at least the Soviet Union was shooting for some form of equality. The United States was an unequal, terrible society.

This is an argument that was made by the Left. It is also an argument increasingly made by a sort of horseshoe theory Right, which suggests that America is bad today and it’s bad for a wide variety of reasons, but it was bad historically in the past as well.

When Donald Trump says, “Make America Great Again,” there are two reasons that his rhetoric resonates with so many Americans. One is that when Americans hear “Make America Great Again,” what they believe is that there are American principles that are fundamentally great, and we have to do a better job living up to them and implementing them. What makes America great, for example, is, say, the Constitution of the United States and its ideals; what makes America great are our principles of limited government, private property, free speech, and traditional values. That combination, that stew of Anglo-American ideals and applied uniquely in the United States, that’s what made America great. We need to get back to that. That’s what they hear when they hear Make America Great.

The other way of hearing it is we think of great moments in American history, and we say we want to be great like we were at that moment. Not that America was “greater” in 1960, when segregation was still on the books in the South, or that America was “greater” in the 1850s, when slavery was still practiced across half the country, but that there are moments in American history in which we have lived up to our great ideals, and we should make America great again like that.

We should have, for example, a unity of purpose as we did during World War II. We should, for example, have an industrialized economy that is forward-thinking and forward-looking the way that we did in, say, the 1950s.

There’s an idea that we have in our head when we say, “Make America Great Again.” And that’s what President Trump is calling upon and appealing to.

But there’s a part of the Right that really believes that America was never great, in the same way that the Left agrees that America was never great. They believe, for example, that the expansion across the West in the early days of America was imperialist and colonialist in the same way that the Left claims that America is imperialist and colonialist.

There’s a part of the Right that believes, like a part of the Left, that the Civil War was wrongly fought, that it would have been better if the South had been allowed to keep slaves, because, after all, an overweening federal government means broader federal power.

There’s a part of the Right that believes, like a part of the Left, that the Gilded Age, in which American industry began to really grow in America, became a world power economically, was bad and exploitative.

And it believes that the United States was bad in World War I, or that the United States was evil in World War II for dropping the A-bomb at the end of World War II, or that the United States was terrible during the Cold War because we opposed the communists too strenuously, and we’ve been corrupted from the inside by globalists.

There is this part of the Right that believes, like the Left, that there is something fundamentally wrong with America and it’s been wrong for generations; that the post-Cold War era was characterized by American evil, that America is a bad force in the world. 

There are many problems with this perspective. The first and foremost of which is that it is historically wrong.

America is the greatest force for human freedom in the history of the world. There is not really a close second. America is the greatest force for human prosperity in the history of the world. There really is not a close second.

Why is this important? Because if you cannot define what makes America great or what made America great, if you are in the moral relativist category of suggesting, for example, that America is akin to Russia, you know, both countries kill people, the sort of Michael Corleone cynical perspective in “The Godfather” when he says to Kay, “Senators have people killed, too,” which is a really puerile perspective. I know people like to cite the Michael Corleone speech to Kay as though there’s a sort of a world-weary explanation of American politics: “American senators have people killed just like dictators.”

No, they don’t. I know America. Do you think that senators in the United States have the capacity to have people murdered willy-nilly the way that Vladimir Putin, for example, shoves people off of buildings in Russia? If you think that, it’s because you are being deliberately obtuse or morally relativistic or both.

Why does this matter?

Because if you don’t know what America is about and what makes America great, how do you defend it? What are the principles that you are seeking to defend?

If you don’t like America at all, what are you defending America from? One of the signal features of the West for generations has been this self-loathing that has taken root in large parts of the Left and certain corners of the Right, the self-loathing that says that the West ought not defend itself in any way, shape or form, and we can’t defend ourselves because there’s something deeply, spiritually wrong with us.

It’s garbage. America has always been worth defending. The country that gave the world the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution is still the greatest country in the history of the world. 

Period.